how did i do on my OC?

[kanezfan]

I bought some stuff finally :bigggrin: Here's what I got, Epox 9nda3+, 1.5GB of ddr-400 (2x256 corsair xms and 2x512 corsair value ram), a winchester 3000+ default 9x200 and a geforce 6600GT agp. I got the board, cpu and vid card for 275 shipped, I thought it was a pretty good deal. Not PCI-e, but it's performed about as well as I'd expected on games I've thrown at it so far.

Anyhow, I had a hell of a time getting the ram to run at 200mhz. I'm sure it's because it's mismatched ram, but hey, 1.5 gigs of ram is awesome. Even when the ram was only running at 100mhz, the system ran great. What I ended up having to do was relax the timings in the BIOS to 3-3-3-8. The xms stuff runs at 2-2-2-5, I don't think the value ram can take that. I had to screw around with the HTT stuff too. I think I ended up at 3x250 and the ram is now running at 205mhz, so the cpu is now running at 2258mhz, not too bad for a novice OC'er, getting a 400Mhz+ OC I think.

What I'd like to know is if you guys can give me ideas on how to wring out the most performance out of this sucker. The guy that sold it to me had it running at 2.4ghz, on air. I know my ram is gonna hold me back, but i feel like I've barely touched the surface of what this thing can do. I'll post some cpu-z screens so you guys can see what I've done exactly, along with the full text output from cpu-z. Also, how much does running the ram at those lower timings affect performance? I can't really feel any difference myself.

[csimon]

Hey kanez be sure you have that ram set to 2t ...which you probably already do.
you can try lowering the multi to x8.5 ...or try x8 and set the frequency limit to 9:10. I'm not familiar with the epox bios myself.
Also ...get an admin to move this to the overclocking section of the forum and you'll get way more help!

[Leonardo]

[moved, as requested, thank you]

[muddocktor]

Hey Kanez, I'm running the same board as you, but with an Opteron 170 in it. The 9NDA3+ has trouble overclocking the ram with dimms 1 and 2 being used (the 2 closest to the proc) and will overclock much better with only 2 dimms in dimms 3 and 4. With that said, you should be able to push that processor quite a bit further even with a stock retail hsf as the winnie 3000+ doesn't put out a lot of heat compared to a P4 or even a barton (in my experience at least, I originally started out with a winnie 3000 in my board). Don't be afraid to bump up the vcore to the board's limit, which is 1.6v with a 3000 winnie. Also, you might try bumping the vdimm up to max (2.8v on my early rev 9NDA3+) and see how the ram responds. Just be sure to watch temps as you bump up the vcore.

As for further overclocking, you might have to slow the ram down some more if it doesn't like the speed as you clock the fsb (HTT actually) up some more. Be sure to run memstest86 as you get higher on the ram speed to check for ram stability so you can tell if you are having ram or processor overclock problems. It would probably be better to set the ram speed at 100 for now while you are seeing what the processor can do to take it out of the overclocking equation and see what the processor will do. Unfortunately, the Epox board doesn't have the many different ram dividers that the DFI boards have, but it does have an extensive selection of other ram timings to experiemnt with.

For now, I wouldn't drop the multiplier down like csimon was saying, since you are running 4 sticks of ram. The 9NDA3+ is certainly capable of running very high fsb/htt speeds, but I would say you need to see what the processor is capable of before doing some fine tuning to get the max performance out of the ram by lowering the multi and raising fsb speed and adjusting the ram speed. Also, that value ram will likely limit what speed the ram will run at too; I'm thinking it won't be stable at much higher speed than present.